A community center in the heart of ethnic Aurora tries to hold on amid funding cuts

The line stretches from the top of the church steps, down the sidewalk and to the end of the block, dozens of people with empty backpacks, grocery bags and even a tarnished red wagon. 

Inside the Village Exchange Center, they will fill the empty bags and wagon with gallons of milk, sacks of lettuce and corn, loaves of bread and bags of pasta. 

The Wednesday food pantry has been a reliable mainstay at the church that became a community center eight years ago, a place where immigrants representing 42 nations in the heart of ethnically diverse Aurora can count on healthy staples to feed their families. The center feeds 4,000 people each week, in addition to providing vaccines in the basement and worship space for religious services ranging from Nepali-Bhutanese Christian to Congolese Christian to Islam. 

But the whole operation is in jeopardy.

In the past few weeks, Village Exchange Center has learned that it stands to lose up to $5.4 million in federal grants. A stop-work order issued by the Trump administration to the state public health department resulted in a week-long shutdown of the center’s vaccination program.

On top of all that, someone lit a fire in the alley behind the center, leading to a night-time scare that the center might catch fire and a lingering fear that the community center is a target for anti-immigrant fury.

“When you don’t provide food or basic services to people, how is that going to affect everyone else in the neighborhood?” asked Amanda Blaurock, CEO and cofounder of Village Exchange Center. “If you were a person that had children and had no way of getting a job, contributing or going to a food pantry and getting food, what would you do?”

On a busy Wednesday, center staff are helping people sign up for WIC, the federal food assistance program for women, infants and children. In the basement, the Colorado Alliance for Health, Equity and Practice is giving COVID shots. Gallons of milk and packages of yogurt are stacked along the food pantry line inside the center, and in an old gym, rows and rows of plastic sacks filled with groceries stretch across the floor. 

Greetings and conversation are happening in multiple languages as people originally from Afghanistan, Somalia and Mexico enter the center.

Mark Anthony, 28 and from Venezuela, volunteered to hand out yogurt. He came to Colorado about two months ago and is hoping to eventually earn enough money that his family can join him in the United States. Anthony is searching for jobs in construction or any industry willing to hire him and sharing an apartment with friends in Denver, he said in Spanish. 

A friend told him about the Village Exchange, so he visited this month for the first time. 

“I don’t have a job yet and this makes me feel like I’m doing something good for others,” Anthony said. “It is so good because it is helping so many people who at this moment cannot work.” 

The Village Exchange opened in 2017 after the congregation of the church on Havana Street donated its land to create a nonprofit community center to support the local immigrant community. St. Matthew Lutheran Church’s congregation had dwindled to about 30 members who were in their 80s and 90s. Its pastor was Marcel Narucki, the stepfather of Blaurock, an international lawyer who committed to operating the Village Exchange for one year but is still there eight years later. 

Need for food has grown since immigration raids

The number of people receiving food each week has grown to about 4,000 from about 3,000 since federal immigration agents raided apartment complexes in Aurora in February and traversed city streets in tactical vehicles. 

The raids happened on a Wednesday, but 800 families still got food from the food pantry that day. Some were too scared to come, Blaurock said, and those who did were scared to stand in line. “People thought the police that were down the street were ICE and people ran in and were crying,” she said.

But in the weeks that followed, the numbers began to grow. “We assumed that the pantry would decline in numbers out of fear, but instead it has increased significantly due to people not going to work, losing their jobs, losing their primary breadwinner to deportations, and then the cost of food going up,” Blaurock said. 

The food pantry is now feeding so many people that it is stretching the operation to two days, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and it’s bagging most of the food ahead of time instead of letting people pick out what they want. Village Exchange also created an appointment system, letting people know what time to arrive instead of asking them to line up at the door. It makes them feel safer, Blaurock said, because a line that stretched multiple blocks drew too much attention to the building. 

People don’t linger and chat as much as they used to; they get their food bags and go back home.

$2.4 million already cut, $3 million more in limbo

A $2.1 million grant from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was cut off two weeks ago. The grant helped feed the thousands of Venezuelans who have migrated to the United States because of violence and political turmoil in their country. 

The city of Denver also had to pull its $200,000 from the community center, money from the same FEMA program.

An additional $3 million in federal aid, including some from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds the center’s farm at Stanley Marketplace, is also on shaky ground. 

Also, three out of eight grants from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment were cut off after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services pulled the funding and sent three orders to stop services. The three grants totaled $650,000 and funded the Village Exchange’s vaccination programs and other health equity work. 

The community center had to shut down the clinic, fire contractors and shift staff, but then was able to reinstate them after Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser filed a lawsuit and obtained a temporary restraining order. 

“This has created instability, chaos,” Blaurock said. “It demoralizes everything we are doing. 

“It might take 20 to 40 hours to write for a federal grant; they are extraordinarily rigorous. All of that time, all of that energy, building a team to do all this work, just decimated with a stroke of a pen.”

For now, the center has been able to continue providing food by relying on donations while hoping that court rulings go in its favor. 

Christian Mendoza, 28, came to Colorado from Venezuela one year ago because “I didn’t feel I had any future for me or for my family.” He works in a restaurant, though the work is sporadic and he doesn’t have work authorization as he waits for a decision on his asylum claim. At the Village Exchange, he loves that he can stay busy helping others, and meet other people from South America. 

As he sorted bags of groceries, Mendoza said the Village Exchange is one place he always feels welcome, especially as news about changes in federal law regarding immigration seem to hit daily. 

Jenny Luevanos, a cultural navigator who has worked at the Village Exchange for two years, moved to the United States from Mexico when she was 15. She also works as an esthetician, but her heart is in the work of helping immigrants new to the country, especially when times feel so uncertain.

“Now there’s a sense of fear, but I mean, people still need to eat so they still come,” she said. “With all the changes in administration, we worry as well. We worry because of our jobs, because of the people, and then, of course, the country, what is this going to look like in a few months?”

Blaurock said she had been trying to keep the community center somewhat under the radar, purposefully avoiding talking publicly about its potential funding crisis because she was concerned that people with opposing political views would fight against it. But it’s time to speak up, she said. 

“I want people to understand that the work impacts everyone,” she said. “It actually is about making sure that everyone is taken care of, that every human being that is here is treated with dignity and respect and honored. That’s how you keep everyone safe. Do you want everyone around you not to have food and become unhoused? 

“We’re just here providing basic services to human beings.”